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NY Times Review Praises Musical Theater Work of Two Alumni

Published on May 5, 2014

A New York Times review of “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace," directed by Thaddeus Phillips ’94 and featuring Jeremy Wilhelm ’96, is highly complimentary of their work. The show, now playing at New York Theater Workshop, is a musical theater work about the last days of Edgar Allan Poe. Wilhelm plays the narrator, Ranger Steve, cited for his “genial, aw-shucks manner.”

“After a spring season of bloated and disappointing new musicals, this spare, haunting and inventive production feels like a salutary palate cleanser,” writes reviewer Charles Isherwood. “It is indeed a treat — if not, let me be clear, anything resembling a standard-issue musical. Appealingly small-scale and handmade, the show casts a hallucinatory spell as it explores the antic behavior and melancholy mind of Poe in the days just before his death at 40.”

The review notes that “Red-Eye to Havre de Grace” makes effective use of Poe’s poems, letters, and more obscure writings (“The Philosophy of Furniture”) to draw viewers “inside the mind of this most distinctive American writer. With an impressive imaginative sympathy, the show’s creators bring alive the man in all his eccentricity, turbulent emotionalism, and abiding loneliness.”

The show, which has been performed at Colorado College during the Summer Festival of the Arts, features haunting original music by the Wilhelm Bros. & Co.